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8am on Sunday morning and I’m baking cookies. This is the only way we can get home baked cookies in July because turning on the oven when the outside temperature is three digits makes everyone miserable for the rest of the day (air conditioner can’t keep up.) I figured since I was already awake and since making cookies sounded nice, I might as well do it. Then we’ll have a good hour for the AC to restore comfortable temperatures before the world outside is too hot.

While I was baking cookies, I also cleaned up the kitchen. It feels good to make a small corner of our lives neat and orderly when so much of the house is jumbled. In fact I think the cooking area of the kitchen is the only public space in the house which doesn’t have extra furniture or stacked boxes in it. Even the bedrooms are somewhat impacted. All of this despite the fact that we have a rented storage pod out in our driveway to contain some of the clutter. It is going to take time to put the house to rights, but I can do the dishes and wipe the counter. It helps.

Yesterday Howard and I went to look at flooring. We have to make decisions about how to replace the flooring that was torn out. It was anxiety inducing to look at our options and try to pick something that we’ll have to live with for the next fifteen to twenty years. What if we choose wrong? What if we spend the money and then regret for a long time? Spinning on those thoughts leads to a mental paralysis. Then I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my teenage son earlier in the week. He was having an anxiety attack because he had twenty dollars to spend on a new game and was afraid of choosing wrong. I told him “go ahead and get it wrong.”
“but what if I get it wrong?” he repeated.
“What if you get choosing wrong… wrong? Wouldn’t that mean you accidentally chose … right?”
I saw the edge of a smile on his face, so I continued, “It would be so terrible to be accidentally right when you meant to be wrong.”
He managed to make a game selection, and judging from the fact that he’s been playing it non-stop for several days, I don’t think he got it wrong. Whether that means he succeeded or failed at what he attempted, doesn’t really matter since he has no regrets.

We chose flooring. Whether it will be right or wrong once it is installed, we have yet to see. Some day in the coming week I’ll have to place an order for the flooring. And I’ll have to make a dozen other decisions which will have long-term repercussions for our living spaces. Hopefully at the end of it all, we’ll like the new look of the spaces. For now, I have fresh baked cookies and a clean kitchen. It is enough.

My house is filled with the roar of fans. It is about as relaxing as standing inside an inadequately sound-proofed jet plane. Damaged flooring and drywall has been removed. contamination is scoured out. Theoretically next week I can begin the process of putting things back together instead of tearing them apart further.

***

I’m thinking about what a joy it is to watch two people who both felt broken find each other and realize that the other one values them for exactly the things they felt were broken. It is beautiful when people heal each other and become whole.

***

As a mother of children with mental health issues, The Nightcore cover of Alex Benjamin’s song “My Mother’s Eyes” breaks my heart. Or rather shows me the ways that my children’s struggles already broke me. Because my children (and their friends) are amazing and so often they can’t see it.
You can listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kejPoXEGpsI
Written lyrics here: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/alec-benjamin-my-mothers-eyes-lyrics.html

***

Sad songs aside, my children are thriving more this year than they have in the prior three years combined. I’ll take it.

***

I only have three weeks to Gen Con and a long list of things I’m supposed to have done before then. Eep!

***

I submitted a short story to a market for the first time in a decade. It was rejected, but at least I did a writer thing.

***

It is 9am and I need to figure out how to make good use of today.

Two days ago I did a brave thing. It was small-scale brave, not heroic brave, the kind of bravery that is all but invisible to those who aren’t living it. I’d had a really long day after a really exhausting week. I had a writing social event on my calendar, but what I really wanted to do was curl up with my people and watch Stranger Things on Netflix. After dithering and delaying, I finally got up and went to be social. The thought which got me off the couch was remember that this is the year I plan to be courageous. I will do the small brave things that inch me closer to who I want to be and the life I want to have.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a young friend of mine who will be heading off to college in the fall. She has a long list of scary adulting tasks in front of her and has been struggling to make herself do them. They are the kind of tasks that once done, you wonder why on earth it was so hard to make yourself do it. Life is full of tasks like that, small but daunting. It is much easier to just sit still and not do them. The only way I can get myself moving on these sorts of tasks is to remember that the only way to get to the future I want is through the forest of small but daunting tasks.

I failed at a writer task this week. I had five months to write a short story. It took several of those months to come up with a concept that matched the anthology theme. Then for the past month I put that story on the top of my to do list. For days I sat on the couch feeling completely stopped, because I couldn’t make the top priority task move forward. Most times I couldn’t make myself open up the file. When I did open the file, writing words felt like trying to push a brick wall up a hill. I’ll grant that during those exact weeks I was also surrounded by a swirl of large-scale distractions: Howard was in the process of switching meds, we had a house problem that required a jackhammer to solve, a baby bird showed up and required care then died before we were able to get it to a rehabilitation facility, and then there was the usual amount of mental noise around running a house. All of that might help explain why I couldn’t get the story unstuck, but it didn’t make it any less of a failure. That sense of failure leaked out into everything else and I began to doubt my capabilities on several fronts.

Then yesterday I opened up a different story file, not the one I was supposed to be working on. That story was easy to tweak and fix. The words flowed and I liked the results. It showed me that I couldn’t move the story because the story was stuck rather than because I was a failure. So I did the small scary thing. I emailed the editor and told them I would not have a story for them after all. It is a sad outcome for my first invitation anthology. And yet, the process taught me skills which will be valuable. It required me to practice small bravery, and with each small bravery I get better at it. And I get a tiny step closer to who I want to be.

Today, for the first time in weeks, I was focused and productive. I blew through a dozen tasks which had felt daunting. That’s the trick with doing small brave things, they make the next thing feel a little less daunting. I ran out of steam by mid afternoon, but that is okay too. Tomorrow is Sunday and I will rest. Perhaps on Monday I can have another day where I move forward with energy and purpose, without fear. Or perhaps I’ll have a day where I need to be brave. I’ll manage whichever comes.

Things I am supposed to be doing today:
Finishing a short story draft so I can submit it to a writer’s group
Launching the process of designing Gen Con banners
Evaluating what needs to be done so we can run Planet Mercenary demos at Gen Con then making an enumerated list of things to do.
Pre-planning to pack up and run a booth at Spikecon/NASFIC next week.
Sewing a cushion for the chair we’ll use at Spikecon next week.
Observing and assisting the construction crew who are doing house repairs
Writing up some missing pieces of text for Big Dumb Objects
Locating some final margin art for Big Dumb Objects
Communicating with the bonus story artist and cover artist for Big Dumb Objects
pre-planning for the Big Dumb Objects Kickstarter
Going into my online store and readjusting pricing for a summer sale.
Sending out an announcement of the summer sale
Creating/planning new merchandise so that we have fresh items to draw people into the store.
Practicing running the Planet Mercenary Demo
Evaluating the status of Escape from the Friggen Jungle and the Precision Mayhem Deck so that decisions can be made about whether to scramble for completion pre-Gen Con.
Writing missing pieces of Escape from the Friggen Jungle.

Things I want to do:
Curl up, watch Netflix, and hide from all of the above.

Things fixed:
2 toilets

Things broken:
Some plumbing
My budget plan for the year
Flooring and cabinets with damage from water seepage
My schedule for the next month or so as contractors are in and out

Things joyful:
Getting to be on TypeCast RPG where I played a halfling cannibal ranger named Toki’Pobo
Coming home to discover that there was a spontaneous LAN party in my absence
This week eggs hatch twice as quickly in Pokemon Go
Finally hanging family portraits on the wall
Expected guests

Things tired:
Me

We’re on day two of our summer schedule and I’m still trying to find my footing in the schedule shift. This is strange because the shift isn’t as big as it was in past years. My recent high school graduate actually finished her credits early and thus hasn’t been to school in more than a month. My other high school student was partially home schooled and so he was at home half the time anyway. On top of that, the home schooling portion of his education continues into the summer. So the lines between school-in-session and school-is-out are really fuzzy. Yet I still feel like catching my balance is necessary. Two and a half months stretch out in front of us before school schedule imposes again. I feel the pressure to make good use of the time.

In organizing my business focus, I’m struggling with project conflict. There is a long list of things I should do and I’m having trouble clearing my head to focus on just one of them. If I attempt to focus on one, the others tug at my attention whispering “but I’m important too!” The trouble is that some of them are important emotionally and creatively while others are important financially and stability-wise. Therefore the weight I should give each project varies depending on whether I’m in a moment where I’m focused on immediate finances or if I’m in a moment where I’m trying to work toward long held aspirations. All the values and importances shift from hour to hour and minute to minute, until I feel lost in a swirl of thoughts.

I keep thinking that if I can establish a predictible schedule of daily/weekly events, that might quiet some of the noise. Of course establishing such a schedule requires me to decide which things get scheduled time and which should fill in the gaps, which lands me back in the evaluation/value mess of thoughts.

I did get some good news on the college financial aid front, so there’s one clear bright spot for the day. Tomorrow I take my newly-minted college freshman off for their orientation day. Hope that goes well.

I had a plan. I was going to step outside my usual round of things for a week. I was going to put down the host of regular tasks and that was going to open up space for me to think writing thoughts and write words.

Ha ha ha ha ha. (<---- me laughing at my own naivete) This was a trip in two parts. The first was a convention where I was support crew for my daughter. While I did have long hours of mostly-solitude, sitting at a table fractured my attention just enough that I couldn't write much. I did accomplish some brainstorming, so I guess that is something. The second part of my trip was visiting my parents and helping them with some household projects. This included helping sort through boxes left by my Grandmother, painting a porch, organizing papers, taking a tour of the Oakland Temple, and untangling twenty years' accumulation of tangled computer cords. When I list it like that, it doesn't sound like much listed in a sentence like that, but I was fully occupied, body and mind, for the entire four days I spent here. I love organizational work. I love taking a jumble and turning it into a functional space. And my parents have such interesting jumbles full of memory and fascinating accumulated objects. It has been a good four days, but today I get to go home and for that I am very glad. Usually when I'm on a trip, I fold away my home thoughts and don't feel much active homesickness. This time home kept tugging at me, my thoughts were with the at-home folks quite a lot. The largest portion of today will be spent in transit, but by evening I will be back in my house and seeing my own jumbles with new eyes. I will get to set things to rights, but only after I've hugged all my people and pet the kitties.

I’ve attended a lot of Science Fiction and Fantasy conventions. Some of them energize me, others are draining. Often the energy or drain have little to do with the event itself and more to do with my emotional state as I arrive at it, or how I engage with it once I’m there. However the people who are at an event can change it from draining to energizing or vice versa. The one I attended this past weekend was draining. Some of that was that I spent the vast majority of the con running a table for my daughter who was off being on panels or teaching workshops. The dealer’s room was cold and because I’m far from my house there were few familiar faces in the crowd. The best hours of the show were when friends sat with me, either at the table or over food, and we talked for hours. Such conversations are the reason I do conventions at all. when my writer friends stopped by to talk, those were bright spots in long hours of keeping myself occupied while not really speaking to anyone. Actual solitude tends to reinvigorate me, but the isolated non-solutude of being behind a dealer table where I can’t fully tune out because I need to be ready to engage people at a moment’s notice; that is draining. The weekend turned out to be worthwhile in an educational sense. An education for which we paid tuition rather than turning a profit.

Now I am at my parent’s house and much happier. I’m here for three days to help my parents accomplish some house projects that can be better done by backs and arms which aren’t slowed by arthritis. Tomorrow we’ll be re-painting their porch. Today we sorted through boxes of things left by my Grandmother. I love this kind of organization. In the boxes were things that were puzzling or fascinating or beautiful. We got to look through all of them and then haul more than forty boxes of things to various thrift stores. On Thursday we’ll get to tour the Oakland Temple which is currently open to the public after a major renovation. I’m really looking forward to being there again. It is the temple I visited as a teenager for many church-sponsored activities. It is where I got married almost 26 years ago. On Friday I get to go home, and by then I will be more than ready. I miss my people and my house.

I’ve written my fair share of Mother’s Day posts that talk about the emotional complexities of this celebratory day. I’ve gotten philosophical about mothering and pondered how I came to terms with being a mother. Some years I posted nothing about it at all. Those were the years where I was doing my best to dodge the holiday and try to forget it was a thing.

So I think it only fair to acknowledge the actual happiness of this year. It seems like Mother’s Day acts as a magnifying glass, amplifying and bringing into focus how I’m feeling about my life and my parenting failures or successes. The good mother’s days are the ones where my kids are thriving and/or demonstrate that they learned some of the lessons I worked so hard to teach. Because if they’re growing, then all the sacrifices of time and emotional effort are redeemed. If they are faltering all my self doubt comes into sharp focus. I know that Mother’s Day isn’t supposed to be a score card. I know I should not use my children’s lives as a measure for my success. I work at not doing those things, but the self doubts creep in, especially during the hard years.

On the joyful years, like this one, I’m not feeling self-congratulatory. What I’m feeling is grateful. I have four amazing children with bright futures ahead and they’re finally stepping forward into those futures. I have Howard, who sneaks out of the house to buy a flowers and an assortment of fancy cheeses because he loves me. I have my mom whom I’ll get to visit in two weeks and who I’ll call tomorrow. I have a yard full of plants that are blooming and about to bloom. I have writer friends who nurture my creative efforts. I have so much in my life that is beautiful and good. Mother’s Day seems as good as any for me to pause and fully feel grateful for all the things I have.

If you are among those who are having a difficult day today, I offer this hope: I’ve had a lot of difficult Mother’s Days, and this year I’m not. Perhaps in your future you’ll also have a day where you feel nothing but happy and grateful.

Today one of my kids had a panic attack at school and he stayed at school instead of coming home. Then after school, he went to a friend’s house, which he hasn’t done in several years. Another of my kids voluntarily left the house to go for a walk in the sunshine. A third had a meeting with a potential mentor and left the meeting excited about possibilities. The fourth spent most of the day head-down in creative projects, calmly working to get them all done.

All of it happened without fanfare. They are growing and it is beautiful to see.